#dc ask meme

[zahri-melitor]

Comic Collection Ask Game:

Oldest comic you own

Most recent comic you acquired

A comic received as a gift

A personally beloved comic

A complete run of a comic

Nominate a character and show what comics about them you have

Nominate a writer and show which of their comics you have

Nominate an artist and show which of their comics you have

Your favourite non-Big 2 comic

Your favourite DC comic

Your favourite Marvel comic

Your favourite kids or all ages comic

Your favourite 17+ comic

Which comic do you most want to recommend to people?

Which comic are you considering selling or giving away?

Who is the most common writer in your collection?

A comic you bought sight unseen on the strength of the writer and/or artist alone

A favourite debut story in a comic

A favourite event comic

What is a controversial comic in your collection?

A Free Comic Book Day comic you like

A comic in your collection that has been retconned out of continuity

A translated comic

A favourite piece of cover art

A comic that has a cover that does not reflect the interior

A comic where you can’t show the art to non-comic fans

An early work from one of your favourite creators

The most trashed/falling apart comic in your collection

A comic you own but have never read

What is a prominent theme in your collection, and when did you notice it?

Comics about your favourite trope

A comic you own multiple copies and/or formats of

[archive-panic]

☕️ How do we feel about Superboy Prime coming back? Or at least having his "redemption" arc

So two things:

I never liked Superboy Prime outside of COIE.

I don’t think a character like SBP can have a cutesy sort of redemption, given he killed so many and with such little remorse.

While I really enjoy Infinite Crisis, I’ve always felt the return of Earth Two Superman and of course Superboy Prime retroactively undermined the ending to COIE (which is perfect). We didn’t need to see them again EVER. That was the point. Following that, we definitely never needed to see him again, what with Countdown and the Sinestro Corps War. The character really overstayed his welcome by Flashpoint.

Now it’s been a long time, but honestly? I didn’t miss him.

Ever.

To be fair, I’m also not a fan of any Superboy, really. I like Kon decently, and Jon was fun while he lasted, and obviously Clark is my boy…but not as a boy. I’ve never liked Superboy as part of his backstory. Call me a poser, but I just reject that. I like Clark to wear the symbol as an adult, and never before. Another hurdle for SBP.

An even bigger one is I’m not sold he’s earned this redemption to begin with.

Let’s be clear: he killed Pantha and Baby Wildebeest in front of Red Star—her partner and his adopted father respectively. And in pretty grotesque ways. Punched off Pantha’s head. He tore the Wildebeest in half. And while I think at least Pantha was brought back through the power of “no one gives a fuck just put her in the issue,” to my knowledge they never really addressed this. Red Star watched the two people he loved most get killed by this monster, and now we the audience are supposed to root for him because he makes Tom King jokes?

Sorry, I need something more real.

Obviously SBP killed way more people than just those two, but they were killed for shock value in gruesome fashion in DC’s second biggest event. Full on Titans. You guys know me; I’m no Titans defender. In fact, Pantha is among my least favorite characters in all of DC. Same with the Baby Wildebeest.

That doesn’t matter.

They’re a part of DC and the Titans’ history, and could have been someone’s favorites. If nothing else, the Titans and especially Red Star should never forgive him. I guess no one gives a shit about that, but hey, I do. I may not like those guys, but I do like drama. Stakes. Characters holding grudges and remembering important events. If nothing else, it’s a horrifically egregious fridging and should be dealt with on those grounds.

Finally, and this is more a topic for another time, but I am so sick of meta stuff if I never read another bit of dialogue like “this is your STORY and I’m just a CHARACTER in your STORY” it would be too soon. YMMV, of course.

When it’s all said and done, it could be good. It might even be awesome. However, I’m just not interested in either the character or his redemption. Even if they tackled his crimes in IC directly, I’m not sure I’d be into it. I just don’t like SBP, and I don’t think he should have even existed beyond 1986, let alone 2026.

[zahri-melitor]

Jason Todd😈 but I'll also be nice and say Babs

Everyone wants to have fun, I see.

Jason Todd.

Well the easy answer here for me in regards to Jason is that he’s a pivotal factor in Bat Lore. We have comics before Jason died and comics after Jason died, and they’re fundamentally different. Jason changed how Bruce perceived his opportunity for loss: losing parents is something everyone knows will happen eventually; most people don’t expect to outlive their child.

The shape of the Batman narrative would be entirely different if Jason had lived, and in many ways every single Batman comic since has reacted to it. Jason’s death is like Mount Fuji if you’re in Japanese media; it’s always there and if you can’t see it you’re probably standing on it.

A LOT of what I love about the Bats and their storytelling depends on Jason’s death.

I think it is interesting how impossible Jason finds it to conceptualise this. He’s so loudly and confidently wrong on his reading of so many situations around anything impacted by his death, and in the context of someone who HAS read the vast majority of Bat comics between 1989 and 2005 that creates a really interesting situation for characters who lived through that time, because it presents Jason as misunderstanding so much, and showcases how much progress and healing occurred.

(The downside is that people who haven’t read it don’t tend to grasp how often Jason’s wrong)

Um what else about Jason? Cheer. I enjoyed Cheer as a story; it felt like a solid direction to take Jason in that might create new storytelling that didn’t overlook everything about post-Crisis Jason.

Now, Barbara Gordon.

She’s my special girl and the reason I’m in this fandom at all.

All of that said, I’m a maximalist on Babs. I love the vast majority of her stories, even when sometimes I have to work to find aspects that still ring true to me. She’s had some fabulous writers work on her and while I desperately wish we had more from some of them (Marguerite Bennett, Geoff Johns is exclusive elsewhere, please come back), I thoroughly enjoy what we have.

I think it’s the combination of skill, temper, grit, and stubbornness that I love from Babs. She is incredibly capable, and she’s extremely my way or the highway, which causes her problems frequently. She’s so like Bruce and that’s what causes them to butt heads. She is spiteful and holds grudges but the thing is when she DOES give in and mend fences it can be amazing (see her relationship with Helena B).

I love how important she is, how messy she can be, how she’s allowed to be flawed like a male character and still prominent. I love that as a character who without John Ostrander and especially Kim Yale would probably have ended up a background minor character after spending the 80s fading away, she’s unavoidable and central and essential for adaptions.

She’s so vibrant and important to the lore and has endured despite attempts to cut her down to size. Even when people want to hand her titles to another character they can’t get rid of her.

Which, for a character who was effectively written out with the comment ‘cripple the bitch?’

Yeah. Indomitable.

[zahri-melitor]

for the askmeme - TT's Nightwing? I'm genuinely confused why people like it, please enlighten me (hard mode don't say the art)

Tom Taylor’s Nightwing run is full of a lot of joy for me. It’s the perfect antidote to Ric Grayson and had me going “I’d almost forgotten Dick could have good writers who love his history”.

What I love about it is how it showcases and interacts with some of Dick’s best runs and wants to work with them while also re-examining them. In an environment where the fandom all constantly frame Dick in the status quo that this run uses, it’s a joy to see a writer just lean into it and go “let’s tell Dick in Blüdhaven stories where he’s constantly rotating through interacting with important people in his life”.

It’s the breather and rest the title sorely needed and just so full of love.

I love the idea of Heartless and the way Taylor uses the character to re-examine the narrative around Blockbuster is really compelling to me. They both have that history that they need a replacement heart, and that they’ll go to any lengths to stay alive. But the way Heartless treats Blockbuster as worthless to him, that he’s barely worth killing? In an environment where frequently writers launch their new villain by having them show up everyone else, the way Heartless and Blockbuster fit around each other makes sense. It’s not just a ‘I beat up your biggest threat and now I’m coming for you’ moment, it’s one that has tied itself into the characters’ lore.

Equally, as a Dick/Babs fan, Barbara’s conversation with Dick in which they get together feels like so much payoff because unlike many of the fans, who want to base everything in their post-Crisis dynamic only, Babs is acknowledging that DICK has been the one that’s been the reason they’re not together since Rebirth. Dick had to get over his own bullshit for this relationship to work, and seeing that flip on their previous dynamic was so special to me.

I know Seeley’s run for some other people has the same sort of reset and reframe, get Dick back to his basics, but for me Seeley’s interest in Dick as a character is focused on runs and characterisation beats that I’m less fond of, while Taylor really clearly was in similar message board conversations to me during the 2000s and likes a lot of the same stuff I like.

Is it a perfect run, and is Tom Taylor skilled at paying off the situations he sets up? No. But what it does give me is a story solidly in the ‘almost there but the remaining flaws make it MORE fanficcable to me” bait zone, which is a really enjoyable, fun place to have comics. It makes me want to dig in and analyse what he’s doing.

[zahri-melitor]

for the salt meme, 19, 26 for Babs, and 28 for Dick?

19: Rant about a change they made to a character of your choice.

The Dinah Drake Lance wars were so bad. I still can’t get over how DC decided to eliminate Dinah Drake, proceed to call Dinah-with-Canary-Cry Dinah Drake Lance, invent a new, worse husband for her (Kurt Lance I will never stop hating you), combined with an orphan backstory, and then immediately realise that Dinah’s tension with her mother over legacy is an important aspect of her character and they wanted the mummy issues back, so invented a NEW separate version of Dinah Drake who couldn’t have the original’s backstory as it had been merged back into her daughter, and so was a hot mess of abandonment and hinted-at martial arts cults.

It’s like there was a reason Dinah was moved to being two people decades earlier for solid plot reasons! How mysterious!

26: What's the worst costume design for Babs?

Partly I want to say the Burnside costume, just because it’s irritating, but it’s not so much a bad costume as it is a bad costume for Barbara.

Her white costume as Bluebelle in Gothtopia is not particularly great either, but if I had to pick something:

Bête Noire. Babs’ Future’s End costume.

Just look at it. The Bat + Bane mashup is SO bad, and full of random unnecessary spikes, and weird detailing. This is not a costume I can realistically see Babs putting on, no matter how much venom she’s on.

28: What's a popular fandom take you disagree with about Dick?

I don’t like 8 year old Robin Dick Grayson, particularly in any version of the story from Bronze Age onwards. Let him be 10-11 years old when the Graysons fall.

The single benefit of having an 8 year old Dick is for a parallel with 8 year old Bruce. Which while I admit that’s compelling, every other thing about the story works just as well or better with 10 year old Dick. It makes far more sense for a performer for the 1960s onwards. It’s the age the entire post-Crisis Bat timeline was based on and hangs off, which means using the younger age breaks fundamental parts of a broader web of ages and events. It gives him a little more time with his parents. It tracks better to Jason and Tim starting around 12-13 if they’re being compared to an 11 year old Dick.

He’s still an incredibly young child. But every extra year you give him here makes things feel less exploitative and more like Dick could actually accomplish anything as Robin.

It’s also a case that, since Dick’s been 17+ since 1969, we don’t actually have a huge amount of explicit storylines outside of his origin story that happened while he was a young Robin. World’s Finest has been doing its best to provide ‘things that happened while Dick was an older Robin’, but apart from a few set pieces in flashbacks and the basics of his original Teen Titans period, everything else with young Dick requires a writer deciding to explicitly canonise some Gold or Silver Age story again. So if Bruce and Dick were the Dynamic Duo for ~8 years together or ~10 years together doesn’t really affect how you fit narratives into that period.

Plus the slightly older age bracket for Dick lined up with the slightly younger side of the age bracket for Bruce makes the complexity of their relationship more poignant. 10-25 is ‘too old for a lot of siblings, too young to be parent and son’, while say 8-28 is firmly in the ‘young parent’ category.

[zahri-melitor]

Every big comics reader has the following:-

The family/books they know way too much about and will read through thick and thin, no matter how dire things get

The family/books they wholeheartedly ignore because they’ve made an executive decision to narrow the potential scope of their reading

The weird niche title they’re obsessed with and almost nobody else is

The run they’re constantly begging other people to read

The run everyone else loves that they quietly hate

The title/run they keep meaning to get to but have never quite made it

The guilty pleasure run

The run with wonky characterisation that they’re still compelled by

The writer they’ll follow into whatever they do

The writer that they’ll stop reading their favourite title for

The character that drives them up the wall

The book they read while despising the main character

The era they just won’t touch

The character that they enjoy and who they know is an expy from another company

Their favourite unattributed sneaky crossover

The villain that they love seeing turn up

The character they insist is not dead

The character that they pretend is dead

The crossover they can’t stop going back to

The crossover they think is terrible and yet get weirdly obsessed with

This ended up looking like an ask meme, so let’s make it one.

[zahri-melitor]

8 and 24 for the ask

8. What hero doesn't deserve their hype?

Who doesn’t deserve their hype? Nia Nal.

I know it’s due to being written pretty much exclusively by her own actress, but Dreamer perpetually steals the focus, attention and energy in every book she appears in. And while yes that’s fine when you’re the headline character of said title, the fact she’s been in two ostensible team titles over the last 18 months (Suicide Squad: Dream Team and then Secret Six) only to steal all the oxygen and focus to the point that almost all the other characters in a group title are just there for set dressing?

I just want a bit more balance. If you’re going to sell a title on the promise that I get to see certain characters in said title, then the people working on that title should be aware that every one of those characters has fans and will be picking up said title to see said character do something.

She’s not the first nor will be the last character to be heavily pushed to audiences, but I just want to not groan with disappointment whenever I see characters I like in a title with Dreamer, because I know they’re just there to stand around and/or get jobbed.

24. Ship(s) that makes you cringe

Ships that make me cringe? I guess a lot of the stuff I can’t stand is mostly from exhausted over-exposure, with a dash of ‘I hate the standard approach’.

Maybe I should run through this in categories.

“HE HAS A WIFE HE LOVES VERY MUCH!”

If you want to ship any of Clark Kent, Wally West or Scott Free with someone other than their longterm spouse, then I want the story to be written in full knowledge and respect of that relationship. I get it. I am fully aware of the fact that all three of these characters have charged emotional relationships with other people that could provide a tasty story. But. Please. The day Clark Kent cheats on Lois without her knowledge is the day the sky falls in. If the ship isn’t willing to grapple with that fact then I don’t really want to see it.

And look, the thing is, I absolutely CAN see the grounds for ships like Clark/Bruce or Dick/Wally. But I almost never want to touch them because of how they’re dealt with. (At least Clark/Bruce writers are generally AWARE they need to navigate around Lois’ existence, even if they do it incredibly poorly; find me a Dick/Wally writer that is aware Linda EXISTS and I’ll barely believe you)

God. I can see the exact places I’d pitch a post-Crisis Dick/Wally fic over the 1996-2006 period (there’s multiple set up spin off points available). I also know if I click on a fic with that tag I am never, ever, going to see said dynamics I can so easily visualise.

“PAIR THE SPARES!”

I would say that at least 70% of Steph/Cass and Cassie/Cissie tags on fic are a case of pair the spares. They’re all definitely lesbians into each other, and it’s just so amazingly convenient that that is the case because it miraculously frees up male characters to be slashed together. Who’da thunk it? They can have one scene to acknowledge their relationship then into the background they go while the story focuses on what’s actually important (the men). I don’t hate either ship but I also find it incredibly convenient how they’re used.

“EVERY GUY IN THIS FAMILY IS DATING THEIR COUNTERPART IN THIS OTHER FAMILY”

Pick one Bat/Super ship. Maybe two if you are willing to do the work. The second I see more than that tagged on the same fic I am out of there.

There actually used to be back in the day a Bat/Arrow version of this which I found amusing, but fortunately for my own patience subsequent events over the last two decades mean it doesn’t pop up enough anymore for me to feel burnt out about it.

(unless what you are doing here is doing a Gods of Gotham-style Bat/Wonder story, in which case I am seated, waiting, and here to hear your gospel about Helena B/Artemis as a ship)

“HERO/VILLAIN”

A solid 90% of these are simply not my cup of tea. For me to care they need to have some solid hook/dynamic outside their combat. Bruce and Selina have been navigating the tug back and forth via Selina’s position on crime for decades. Bruce and Harvey is compelling BECAUSE they were friends and allies when they were young. And Diana and Barbara Minerva works so well because Cheetah really doesn’t want to be driven to kill. Pretty much everything else can go off to the bin.

"SHIPPING JASON TODD"

If Jason's involved in a ship, the other character (generally Tim or Dick or Roy or whoever) is about to be flattened and lose 99% of their personality in the pursuit of being an emotional mess that Jason needs to save and educate on the benefits of killing people who've wronged you. The question of whether anything happening in this story is of benefit to anyone other than Jason's character, guilt and rage never comes up.

“NOBODY SHIPS THIS, STOP IT CANON”

Dinah/Kurt Lance: fortunately I have never actually come across anyone who actively ships this, but if I were able to scrub everything about this relationship out of canon I would. Ugh.

[zahri-melitor]

batcat and brutalia?

Bruce really likes flirting with people he knows are bad news.

Bruce/Selina: I am soppy for these two. They’re both running away from their problems, but also Selina is about the only love interest of Bruce’s that you see embracing being both Batman AND Bruce’s partner fully. She is very fond of the inherent joke that is a jewel thief being in love with a billionaire and getting to go out in public as a Rich Person with him.

They can kiss on a rooftop in the rain and invite the other to a picnic at night on the opera house roof while also running off to Monaco to wear designer clothing and swan around on yachts for a holiday OR to solve a mystery together.

Bruce/Talia: …I really enjoy them in their role as reluctant coparents?

I’m sorry, I’ve read Dennis O’Neil Talia, and I don’t get the Epic Romance other people do from this. I also think a lot of people are overlooking the amount of Sorcerer’s Daughter stereotype baked into her that really doesn’t interact too well with the accompanying Dragon Ladyness from her origin. The problems were extant before Morrison. The problems go back to her creation. There is no unproblematic version of Talia, so I might as well enjoy one where she’s at least enjoying herself.

I far more enjoy Talia embracing her power base within the League and manipulating things for her own ends over Talia “yes father you can marry me off to Batman/Bane/Whoever without asking me”. And in that embrace of her power base, it puts her at odds with Bruce in ways that are harder for either of them to compromise on.

Bruce and Talia having a permanent link that means they have to deal with each other (Damian) but also the existence of that link being a fundamental betrayal between them (because even on the nicest version of events, Talia lied about her pregnancy and made decisions about Damian’s childhood that Bruce would never have consented to)? That’s interesting. That’s a constant set up for drama. It’s got story power.

And it provides something other than the “torn between my love for you and my filial devotion to my father” merry-go-round.